When I was about twelve
I began to see my future
as a ruthlessly effective
overpoweringly sublime advocate for justice
as global peace outcomed and measured,
As a courtroom drama officer
of the U.S. multicultural Court EcoSystem,
A flaring hot attorney
of the U.S.
and global green
legal testosterone-preferred system.

When I was about sixteen,
I began to question the resilience
of Win/Lose ecological and theological partial-rapture Dreams.
I wanted to belong
in a more resilient WinWin restoration
of local through global peace through ecojustice
and how could I do that
in a Win/Lose punishment egosystem
designed to avoid
or at least ignore
Loser predator and Loser prey’s ultimate EarthTribe outcomes,
pathological death and dying degeneration?

When I was about twenty
I began to see myself
as a great preacher and teacher
of WinWin co-redemptive multicultural
and permaculturally perennial religion
evolving straight through reincarnate cultures
ourselves.

But, how could I become that sainted preacher
of rainbow natural and spiritually timeless integrity
as an uncommitted agnostic,
a mere investigative journalist
rather than an active subject of history’s grand full-voiced stage,
or passive object of Win/Lose greed and lusting culture?

I lack sufficient articulation
within any one integrity path,
one Paradise garden polypathic,
one walk within God’s harmonic matriarchal newborn voices,
speaking creation
through naturally diversifying generations,
Advocating spiritual renewal
restoring WinWin revolutions
across every overt and pervert and divert system
in every sacred land?

When I was about twenty-four
I felt sufficiently redeemed
as a green gay prophet
of sensory revolutionary WinWin experience,
with some Win/Lose rapacious and tragic defeating compromises
with Truth
acidically associated WinWin kinships
with Earth’s diversely sheltering lights
and rhythmic patterns
of 4Dimensioned dynamic habitats
developed through cooperatively systemic relationships.

When I was about 64
I began to understand
how miserable I would have been
as a Win/Lose advocate
of U.S. violently punishing elite entitlements
for an anthrocentric legal system
with no orthodox health v pathology insight,
little cooperative ecological hope,
bad mono-elitist inaccessible entitlement toward MisTrust
that once we enter God’s Great Patriarchal CourtRoom
anyone could possibly become integrally healed
for and by and of and with profoundly accessible
Win/Win experiential love
for Ego co-arising therapeutic Eco-justice
inside as outside habitat
of sainted green advocates.

I learned the other day that my immune system is gone. She just up and left. No goodbye, no Dear Jerry letter, no flowers, not even an email to let me know; hoping I wouldn’t notice why systemic failure grows more prominent.

My doctor told me about this sly exodus. She is this vibrant buxom Russian immigrant with long wavy auburn hair, and the sturdy solid nature of totalitarian atheistic culture, and the bedside manner of Attila the Hun. Still, she tries her best to break dark news, reaching for anything she might recall to work with human feelings, other than pain and suffering. Pain she understands, and believes we should all be much more tolerant of our petty, relentless, agonizing Teachers, like not being able to bear weight on my left foot, for example. Her best medical advice was stay off your foot. Teach my kids how to feed and care for each other. Take a nap.

Anyway, she breezes into the examining room where I am sitting, mostly clothed, perched on the edge of the exam table with naked feet anxiously touching the pull-out steel footrest. Waving my not very thick file in her dominant left hand, before the door slams shut behind her, she asks me if I know that I am Positive.

Her radiant smile did not seem to be begging me to tell her I already knew so she was not in the position of actually having to think about how to be kind.

I didn’t know what was the right best answer:

Yes, thank you, and I’ve always found you to be a positive person too?…

No, in fact I hope my husband of the last twenty years will be surprised to hear this as well….

Well, I have been getting sick a lot lately, coming down with weird stuff normal people don’t usually have a problem with, like breaking out in hives in my armpits, so it does cross my mind, now that you so generously mention it, that maybe my immunity guards have departed without giving notice, or even closing the door of vulnerability on their way out….

But, instead, I just say No, quietly, in awe of this strangely-shared boundary moment.

So she hesitantly touches my forearm, and valiantly tries to continue smiling, to reassure me that it will be OK, not a death sentence, her extractive words.

Well, that was good to know, especially because I hadn’t even realized I was waiting for sentencing. I wasn’t even aware of my charges or my trial, my judge, or my apparently merciful jury.

But, I had been feeling vulnerable, and learning I am vulnerable to all the cooties and disease and suffering and pain in this world, on this Earth, within this EarthTribe, leaves me feeling mushy and rotten, old and used up, or at least overripe for decay, inside, then outside.

Vulnerable.

Wide open to whatever comes along, available, accessible, for good and bad.

An open vortex for anyone or anything to use as even my own defenses have evaporated, not like a sunset over the ocean, when that last radiant arcing flash says goodbye until tomorrow. Rather, the loss of immunity, the ache of endlessly inclusive vulnerability, uncovers a quietly creeping dawn, except instead of Earth gradually emerging until I must open glad eyes to discover Her visible presence once again, one more time, this time, her sobbing and singing, dancing, lavishly beautiful Time, my Interior Landscaped self-consciousness gradually purges to uncertain self-identity, and less concern about where you begin and where I end, because my ending is already predicted by lack of self-defense.

A well-fired strength lurks within this deep ecology of grateful emptiness. Creating a winterish listening place for all nutrients and toxins around and within me, a place, a jump in, the water’s warm recreating safe-space where each can be heard, embraced, have a say about our future together. How long we may or may not sustain our interdependent web of life.

Without capacity, perhaps even the desire, to exclude often dissonant nutrients and voices, tastes and smells, feelings and awareness, difficult and insane immigrants, I invest this sacred listening mountain in regenerating new connections, new ways of seeing appositional, dialectical rationality, rather than oppositional polarity.

I learn to long for ways we might survive together that would be in your best interest as my self-interest dissipates into a dark vortex of Yin openness. If our shared values for diversely nutritional compost disappear, then I have no hope to grow my own.

Finding harmony within this apparent dissonance and disease and suffering and insanity is the only vocation left to this EarthTribe Identity, softly individuating within Earth’s resilient resonance, my boundaries of immunity to you removed. All remaining for me is my subsidiarity to Earth’s well-being, for here we all return, generative memory seeds of language and code, capturing voices stringing songs back, back to stardust Elders.

We are Earth’s Tribe dying to remember to fly together like the stars from which we emerged, the Earth which we reincarnate; and trying to not fly apart quite so awfully much.